


Broken Hairbrush

by dragonshost



Category: Fairy Tail
Genre: F/M, Implied Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-30
Updated: 2017-04-30
Packaged: 2018-10-25 15:36:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10767222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dragonshost/pseuds/dragonshost
Summary: A lot of memories reside in his broken hairbrush.





	Broken Hairbrush

Fingers, calloused and scarred, gently massaged into his scalp. Working through tangles and knots that hadn't seen a brush in weeks.

_"Your hair is appalling."_

_He knew that. He'd long since known that. "No shampoo or conditioner. No soap." Only the salvaged hairbrush that she carefully ran through his brittle, thin locks. "And I don't know how to make any myself. How is it that you keep yours so healthy?"_

_She hummed as she worked through a tangle. "My hair is my magic, my gift from the Eternal Flame. I learned how to make my soap for it as a child. I will teach you."_

Rivulets, black with grime and more sludge than water, ran down his body. He'd tried to conserve his stock as long as possible, but he'd run out of her soap long ago.

_When it was his turn, the brush slid easily through the rusty strands, a stark contrast to her hard-won battle against his. Voluminous, a heavy red tide in his hands. "Just soap can do this?" He suspected other sorcery at work here. Not even in the best of days, before the world ended, had his ebony hair been like hers._

_"I also eat."_

_He had nothing to say to that.  
_

Ribs no longer protruded beneath his skin, and his belly was flat, not a pouch - his organs all crammed together under his shrinking skin. But Rogue could still see them there, beneath the slight growth of muscle. That faded image was never far beyond his skin.

_"Join me. I've warmed the spring."_

_A laugh - rusty from lack of use - arose from him as he sank into the water. "Are you sure you want to waste your magic on this?"_

_Her answering smile warmed what even the water could not, the ice in his heart melting away. For just a little while - so long as they shared this space._

It was almost funny, how even though he remembered that the spring had been hot, he couldn't remember what its touch felt like.

Or hers.

Even now, he allowed the water to run cold.

_"There's only five left now," he informed her, after she returned from her trip. Roars sounded in the distance, to a far-off cadence of leather wings against the sky. "But they'll be coming to this spot soon. So we need to move, already."_

_She went to him, in his spot he hadn't moved from for days while he waited for her return. Then she reached out with trembling palms, fingertips dancing along the new, too-pale platinum strands that lacked the vitality of the sun, of warm smiles. They were nothing like..._ his _. If the change belonged to a phantom, shouldn't they at least resemble him?_

_Rogue held his face in hands caked with dried dragon blood, unable to look at her._

_"...They're the wrong colour," she stated finally, seeing not the man Rogue had known, but her own ghost._

_Those words broke him, snapping the last tenuous strand of his control._

_She held him while he sobbed._

Clean, the locks in his hands were liquid moonlight. They gleamed in his hands, spooling upon the stone floor.

Still the wrong colour.

_He came back from his scouting three days later than expected, excited for the discovery he'd made. Eager to share what he had found still standing in the flowering rubble that had once been Crocus. There was a way out for them, at last. A way to change everything._

_There was nothing left waiting for him, but smears of red on the floor and a broken hairbrush._

It was time. Time to face the past he'd run away from for seven years. Time to erase it, once and for all.

Seven dragons would be ideal, he decided in the grand suites afforded to important castle guests.

Six to handle the ones he could not control in the future.

And one for the dragon that had made them.


End file.
